Charles Nurse wrote
Does anybody remember this contest:
http://www.packtpub.com/article/2008-open-source-cms-award-winner-announced
DNN was third - only being beaten out by Drupal and Joomla - not bad considering our Windows heritage, and we received some positive comments from the judges.
That part I never really understood and just wrote it up to the fanboy-ism that revolves around Joomla and Drupal. I've personally converted several sites FROM Joomla / Drupal TO DNN because of usability issues. One that I'm currently working on is a local municipal website which, while having a clean design, had no training or intuitive usability. The customer came to us after having spoken with one of our medical customers and their raving reviews of how easy maintaining their website was:
- There was no confusing "Section Editor" "Frontpage Manager" "Catagory Manager" with enabled/disabled/checked out items
- There was the ability for us to custom define more than 3-4 'security roles' as opposed to Joomla which hard limits you
- When you want to update a DNN site, you click on the 'Edit Text', 'Create Article', 'Add Link' or what have you.
- In comparison to most of our other websites, training for a DNN-based website takes ~1hr whereas we are still providing 'training' (really just applying the updates for them)
I'll admit, some of DNN feels a bit clunky but it's my experience that tends to be on the designer/developer's plate... Poorly designed skins, badly laid out designs and content, and not fully understanding how to implement the features and /or controls of the modules. When it comes down to brass tacks, I've been pretty pleased with DNN (especially with the recent improvements) and the fact that the cost is low-to-nil makes it even better in my opinion.
-Wells
P.S. Also, I have been very excited by the new set of skins I've been seeing come out on Snowcovered, particularly ones like GLOSS (http://www.snowcovered.com/snowcovered2/Default.aspx?tabid=242&PackageID=12565)